Mission: Possible

The mission should you choose to accept it is to: find a great daycare for your little one which will allow cloth diapers, is easy to get to, and is affordable. Oh, and you have four business days to do this since we want you to start yesterday, therefore the daycare needs immediate availability. This was my mission recently as I made the choice to re-enter the non-work-at-home workforce.

Since we have invested all of our time and energy into cloth diapering our little girl, we decided that a daycare that wouldn’t at least talk to us about cloth diapering wasn’t going to work for us, despite being crunched for time. We called every daycare in our town (yes, it is small enough that an hour on the phone exhausted the list) and found a few that would cloth diaper for us, provided we used a pocket, all-in-one, or a gdiaper (Yay! Since that’s most of our stash and they know enough to tell us what kinds they would accept). However, the earliest availability they had was February.

Since the position I accepted was in a nearby town we looked there. I called multiple places and a few said, “Sure,” but sounded like they were already drunk at 10 am, so we decided not to call them back. Eventually I found one and they said, “We’re not sure.” The opening I had been hoping for! I have convinced several people that cloth diapering is easy, so just the willingness to give me a shot had me encouraged that I would be able to convince them the cloth diapers are the way to go. I set up a time to meet with the daycare director and I was good to go.

Now, to get a diaper bag ready for convincing someone they need to cloth diaper. I took along one of every different style we have: so a gdiaper with a cloth insert, a separate gdiaper liner stuffed with a disposable insert, a pocket with aplix and a pocket with snaps.

I also took both cloth wipes and disposable wipes, and never forget the wet bag. The meeting came around, and since my little girl had a wet diaper at the time it was a perfect lesson in the making. I took out the various diapers and asked which they would prefer to use. They chose pockets since those essentially look and work just like the disposable diapers they were used to using. I then asked about the wipes. Since they have a sink right there (legally they have to in most states) I was able to use some warm water to wet the wipe, take the wet diaper off, wipe the bum, take out the wet insert for the pocket she was wearing and put it all in the wetbag with my little audience. Score one for cloth wipes as well since the teacher said, “I’ll just use the cloth wipes and put it all in the bag.”

The real test though was the first day of daycare. I put together a bag with as many of the same diapers as possible. For me, this meant all the blueberry and fuzzibunzpockets that I own. I picked giving them snaps because I could tell them where to set them versus letting them guess, figuring the less they had to “wonder” about the better my chances. I dropped her off, reminded the teacher about the pockets and told her where to snap the diaper so that it was fitting best. I came back at the end of the day my daughter was still in the same outfit. I asked the teacher how it went and she said it was super easy and great! She then wondered why more people didn’t use those… I may have another cloth convert in my midst. Mission Complete.

Bio: Carolyn recently returned to the work place and enjoys the extra income to buy extra fluff!

3 comments:

I always send snap diapers for my babysitters and I just snap them to the correct snap in the diaper bag and tell the babysitter to put the diaper on my son on the same snaps that it is already on (usually there is at least one left in the bag they can use as an example)

How awesome. This gives me hope. We are mainly using cloth diapers for medical reasons on our little one but were afraid no daycare would work with us. We have been investigating having a nanny come to our home instead of daycare as we figured we would have more luck with getting them to use cloth diapers if there were not disposables for them to reach for. Thanks so much for the blog.

Hopefully more and more people will begin to realize the ease of cloth-diapering. I cloth diapered my second daughter and got many questions from onlookers about the whole idea of it- "does it really work"? Those types of questions. Glad that your blog raises awareness about the simplicity of cloth diapering.